Investment Biker Page 38

  “I want him fired,” I said, “and I want that office sealed so he can’t get in. Have someone call that credit-card company and make sure I’m not responsible for whatever he’s run up. Get an accountant in to go over the books to see what’s missing.”

  I was as agitated by this as about anything on the trip. I knew where the bulk of my assets were, and he surely couldn’t make withdrawals without my authority—could he? The brokers had clear instructions about this. Surely the worst was that the phone would get turned off, one of our credit cards would get shut down—wasn’t it? Was I broke? Would I have to go back to work?

  I set out with a grim face to enjoy the local sights. There didn’t seem to be any more I could do for a day or two, so I would enjoy my stay here—if it killed me.

  Barbara discovered that Judd had been trying to shift fifty thousand dollars from one of my brokerage accounts to a particular bank account over which I’d given him power of attorney.

  Judd finally showed up. They fired him and sent him a certified letter. Bills and papers were in piles everywhere, records were in chaos, and God knew what was paid or not. It was a horrible mess, she said, and it was essential that I fly home right away.

  Yes, she had changed the office lock. Yes, she had canceled his power over any bank and brokerage accounts. Yes, she had found the package with the necklace, and would put it in a safety-deposit box. No, she couldn’t find any more attempts at embezzlement. When was I going to be back?

  Sally, the temp bookkeeper, was unable to focus on much, which doubtless perfectly suited Judd’s purposes. Ask her what the weather was like and fourteen minutes later you still were trying to find out. You had to grab her mind and shake it and shout, “Stop right here. Now, how is the weather today?” We needed her, though, because we needed a home base to take care of our credit-card charges and cash advances. Those bills had to arrive somewhere and be paid. She knew where the checkbook was and how to find everything, so I decided to hire her full-time, do an audit, and chase Judd legally.

  “I’m not sure hiring her would be wise,” said Barbara. “She feels guilty about turning Judd in, for biting the hand that hired her.”

  “Who’s been paying her salary? It was my money! What about loyalty to me?”

  “No need to get excited, Jim. She’s just incompetent in some matters.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Well, we could put an associate in here.”

  “What would you charge?”

  The per diem she proposed charging would be enough to send a platoon around the world. Already her bill was likely to be more than the embezzlement. All I wanted for the next three months was someone to answer the phone and pay the bills. Without a method for paying them, we couldn’t move.

  Saying for the tenth time I ought to fly right up, she promised to hire Sally. I would keep trying to grab her mind during telephone conversations.

  Quelling my unease, I decided to push on with the trip. This was the dream of a lifetime, and interrupting it by flying back to New York would violate its spirit.

  We drove along the Pan-Am Highway and then down to the small town of Algarrobo, where we hired a private boat to take us out to a penguin colony on a small island. The boat turned out to be a skiff that I was sure was going to capsize in the chop.

  We were delighted to find a pelican colony and even sea lions. A private yacht club had built a sea barrier out to this island to protect its cove. This allowed predators to steal out and eat the penguins’ eggs, causing their population to decline.

  This ride through the Andes is stunning, some of the best motorcycling in the world. At times the Pan-Am runs along the sea, sometimes midway between the mountains and the sea, and other times it cuts back into the mountains and meanders along the top of a plateau. It then dips through long valleys with mountains towering on either side. The climbs into and down from the mountains are thrilling. Even the colors are out of this world: deep emerald-green grass; small bushes of a dark kelly green, except for the new growth on top, which is a bright light green. The cacti are an all-together different green, paler, yet no less intense.

  The Chilean Pan-American Highway is another feat of extraordinary engineering, with good pavement, banking, and drainage despite the heights and depths. At times as we shot through the mountains it was terrifying to peer down into bottomless gorges.

  As we neared Vallenar, plant growth thinned out. According to our map, we would soon be in another desert. Along the highway were small monuments, crosses, and shrines to mark the places people had died in accidents, many more than we had seen in Argentina or the USSR. Many of these were on flat, straight surfaces. Why? Had the drivers fallen asleep? Had they been drunk? Too young or inexperienced to understand the dangers of driving?

  These certainly caught our eye. Perhaps we ought to erect black spots or something equivalent in the United States.

  Finally we reached the desert, much of which looked as barren as the landscape on the moon. The section in Chile, six hundred miles up the Pacific, is known as the Atacama Desert. The desert continues up through Peru almost to Ecuador; sometimes it is only a few hundred yards wide, sometimes several miles. Normally the area between the sea and the mountains, such as in California, is green and fertile, but not here. Called the driest desert in the world, there are some spots of it where rainfall hasn’t been recorded for more than four hundred years.

  So we rode through the desert past snowcapped mountains just to our right and the Pacific Ocean just to our left. The desert, mainly red but sometimes white, constantly changed from dirt to stones to sand to boulders and always smelled of the sea.

  My relationship with Tabitha had changed over the trip, as I suppose it would have with over fifteen months alone together. I remembered vividly back when we were coming out of Bulgaria and the plug had fallen out of her carburetor. We’d scrounged around and found an old rubber tube, and using the miracle 3M tape, put plugs into the carburetor, which had worked. At the hotel that night she had been excited, happy, pleased, with a beautiful expression on her face. We had triumphed. We’d had a breakdown and we’d been resourceful enough to fix it without anybody else’s help. I’d been too tired or insensitive to relish the moment.

  A few months later, in Russia, I had been amazed by the tender relationship between Igor and Valentina, the husband-and-wife helmet manufacturers.

  They had opened my eyes to the possibility of still feeling this way after a long marriage and children. Maybe there was something to the idea of true and lasting love. As we drove up the west coast of South America, I realized how much my entire feeling about Tabitha had changed and was still changing. I found myself wildly happy to have her with me. Both of us woke up glad to be with each other, excited at how happy and delicious it was to be together.

  We felt triumphant that our love was deepening. I now knew I could make a lifetime commitment; I wondered if our partnership would last after the trip, or if I could find someone else with whom I could have a lifetime commitment.

  We decided that even though we were going through these romantic feelings here in South America, we would do nothing for six months after we got back—not break up and not get married. We’d been out of our world back home for a long time, over fifteen months, and we would need a period of adjustment.

  Life on my return to the States? My adult life seemed to have been divided into two parts, before 1980, when I was on Wall Street, and after 1980, when I was doing a variety of things culminating in this trip. The trip marked the end of the second part of my life, and I was ready for part three. I didn’t know what that would be, but I wanted a new life, and I was ready to work at it.

  We neared Peru, home of the Shining Path.

  The Shining Path was a decade-old guerrilla movement, the only Maoist guerrilla movement left in the world at the time. Chairman Gonzalo, a Peruvian academic-intellectual trained in philosophy, had decided he was the world’s “fourth sword,” the merciless successo
r to the three prior blades of Marx, Lenin, and Mao Tse-tung. His organization, the Shining Path—officially the Peruvian Communist Party—was going to take over Peru and then South America and lead the world into a worker’s paradise.

  To him, every socialist regime of recent times, including Albania, North Korea, and China, had gone in the wrong direction, selling out. The true struggle was not between the Path and the army, with whom his cadres had regular shootouts, but against Peru’s capitalist structures, which he was determined to destroy. His cadres threatened anyone—priests, Peace Corps volunteers, and foreign-relief workers—who wasn’t working through bloody revolution to improve the lot of Peru.

  When we were in Australia, the press was full of stories about three Australian nuns, in Peru to minister to poor Peruvians, who were gunned down by the Shining Path. The Path’s logic went something like, “You nuns are supporting the state by working to make things better for the poor, so we’re going to do away with you.”

  Here in South America the newspapers were full of stories warning of the Path’s vow to kill all foreigners. It gunned down innocent travelers to kill tourism and hurt the currency in order to damage the state.

  In another example of the Path’s ruthlessness and bizarre reasoning, a few weeks before we came through it had captured three Japanese agronomists at an experimental farm fifty miles north of Lima. Its reasoning was that any foreigners working in Peru must be working for the state because they weren’t working for the Path. The Path executed the agronomists.

  The Japanese government pulled out its fifty-two agricultural engineers from Peru. The Path’s five thousand rebels were paralyzing a nation of 22 million people and an army of 120,000 soldiers.

  These stories naturally gave us pause. Not only were we North Americans, which I supposed to Maoist guerrillas made us worse than Australians and Japanese, and not only were we travelers, whom they had vowed to gun down, but I was what the Path’s theoreticians might call an arch-capitalist, the anti-Christ, a capitalist prince of darkness—at the very least, a capitalist running dog.

  In addition to reading the press, we stopped in many Peruvian consulates along the way to ask, “All right, how is it these days? Where are they now?”

  Of course, the embassy officials always said the Path was under control. Consulates and embassies were being paid to say, “Come to beautiful Peru.”

  The country sounded worse than a war zone. In a war, neutrals might have been protected by international conventions. Yet in addition to these fanatical guerrillas, Peru was in the midst of the worst cholera epidemic of the twentieth century.

  At the border we went into the Peruvian consulate on the Chilean side. This was our last chance for information. If the news was bad, we would skip Peru, cross the Andes on an unpaved road, push into Brazil, and somehow drive north through hundreds of miles of Brazil’s outback to Central America, none of which would be as good as driving the Pan-American Highway.

  We started with the easy questions, asking the consul about the highway north.

  “For the first sixty miles or so it’s not too good,” he said, “but after that it’s fine all the way to Lima.”

  This was a relief. Bad roads are a motorcyclist’s nightmare. I asked, “Can we change money on the other side?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said as if I had asked something as stupid as if Peruvians wore clothes. “There’s a bank right across the border.”

  Now for the big question. “And the Shining Path?”

  He paused. “Are you sticking to the Pan-American Highway?”

  “Yes.”

  He smiled. “Then you won’t have any problem. The Pan-Am is my country’s major transportation artery. It’s very much in the interest of my government to make sure the rebels don’t take it over.”

  This all made sense, so with a feeling of relief we set out north.

  On the other side of the border, however, there was no bank. We asked the police for the bank, and they sent us to the next town, ten to fifteen miles down the road, where we found the vestiges of the black market.

  The consul was also wrong about control of the Pan-American Highway. The Path attacked towns along large stretches of it.

  We wound up staying in one town with no electricity. The day before the rebels—its saviors?—had blown up its only generator.

  The hotel here was a rathole compared with many of the other South American places in which we’d stayed. Imagining a Path sympathizer driving by at night, seeing our foreign bikes, and spreading the word to Path higher-ups, we found a neighbor who for a dollar allowed us to store our bikes in her living room.

  As we drove north along the ripped-up highway and went through devastated village after village, it was clear in leaving Chile we’d left prosperity and plunged back into the Third World. How the Path expected to persuade the majority of Peruvians to follow them by blowing up generators, killing innocent nuns and tourists, destroying the economy, and holding up banks was beyond me. The Path was led by a former professor. One would think he would have enough intellectual honesty to send a lieutenant—or even go himself—to see the economic miracle in his southern neighbor. Any honest person might wonder if maybe he’d made a mistake. Wouldn’t a fearless rebel leader have enough intellectual honesty to examine the past and the present socialist economies of Peru, North Korea, Russia, and Cuba and compare them with their democratic and free-market counterparts in Chile, South Korea, Taiwan, and Botswana to see what he could learn about helping his people? God save us from true believers, whether devoted to religious, political, or intellectual theories.

  In keeping with the Peruvian consul’s batting average, the Pan-American Highway was in bad shape all the way to Lima. Despite the few police checkpoints, the guerrillas came and went as they damn well pleased. That consul’s job was to sucker travelers into the country. More probably he was a typical bureaucrat, with no idea what he was talking about. He had succeeded in bamboozling us.

  We must have been his only customers for months. The Shining Path had done its work well. From the bottom of Peru all the way to Lima we didn’t see a single foreign license tag, whether from other continents or Chile, Bolivia, or Argentina. Actually, we saw very little traffic.

  Every factory we passed had walls around its compound, big walls with guards at the corners with guns. If there weren’t signs saying copper refinery or whatever, we would have thought these were prisons. At one point the newspapers said the Path had blown up forty banks. Every bank we saw had about fifteen armed guards standing around looking nervous. The huge amount of money the Peruvians were forced to spend on security was a drag on its economy. If it ever got this war behind it, Peru would become much more competitive worldwide.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted the trip ever to end. I decided I would do it again.

  “Sure,” said Tabitha, “but next time I’ll stay home, worry, and write the checks.”

  “I’ll do it in twenty-five years,” I said. “I’ll follow the same route in the log, stay in the same hotels, and see how the world has changed.”

  Twenty-five years. I’d be seventy-two, not so old, really. I’d write another book about how all the countries, people, places, and I had changed.

  At the end of every day we always stopped and got gas before we checked into a hotel. One day after we filled up I gave the attendant a credit card. Despite signs saying that the station would take them, he didn’t know how to process it. Nobody had ever given him one before, so I had to go inside to see the owner. Frantic examining of manuals, a huge hassle over how to deal with this bizarre transaction. Finally the owner discovered he couldn’t charge more than six dollars at a time, so I gave him three cards, which totally flummoxed him. This provoked another hullabaloo, with the owner calling three separate banks to make sure this wasn’t a North American scam at his expense.

  Impatient and hopping from foot to foot, I was in there quite a while. Tabitha was outside watching the bikes. A truck pulled up and fiv
e guys piled out, all with AK-47s, the revolutionary weapon of choice. Since they weren’t in military uniforms, she knew at once it was the Path. As they filled up the truck, a guy cradling an AK-47 drifted over and started flirting with her.

  Tabitha leaned over to wipe off her Argentinian tag and immediately formulated another essential rule for traveling around the world: If a guy with an AK-47 flirts with you, flirt back. Don’t say, “Mind your manners,” or “Don’t be fresh”; giggle and laugh. She flashed her wedding band and said her husband—her big husband—was inside. All the while she laughed at his jokes. His chums filled up with gas and paid the attendant with cash, as the Path didn’t issue company credit cards.

  Finally the AK-47 asked, “Which way are you going?”

  She giggled again and asked, “Which way are you going?”

  “South.”

  She looked disappointed. “We’re going north. It’s too bad.”

  When I came out, the tail of the truck was rounding the corner. She was white with terror.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Thank God you took so long,” she said and told me the story.

  “I had to show the owner—” I stopped short. Had my life been saved by the slow processing of a credit card? “Let’s get out of here.”

  She shivered. “Nothing I want more.”

  Lima had once been the capital of the vast vice-royalty of Peru, which included Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina as well as Peru itself. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries it had been a city of wealth and luxury that no others in the Americas could rival. For several centuries, when Europeans thought of America they thought of Mexico City or Lima.

  I have mixed feelings about the development of the Spanish Empire in America. Somebody eventually was going to discover these two continents, which would lead to their integration with the rest of the world. This was good. Unfortunately the conquistadors were not the noble explorers about whom we read in school; they were thugs. Like the Huns sacking Rome, they destroyed the thousand-year-old civilization they encountered, giving no thought to the cultural treasures they pillaged. They melted down tens of thousands of priceless gold artifacts and shipped the ingots back to the motherland to swell that country’s war chests.